Stephen Hannock is an American luminist painter known for his atmospheric landscapes and incendiary nocturnes. The artist has demonstrated a keen appreciation for the quality of light, and for the limitations of conventional techniques for capturing it. His experiments with machine-polishing the surfaces of his paintings give a trademark luminous quality to his work. The larger vistas also incorporate diaristic text that weaves throughout the composition. His design of visual effects for the 1998 film What Dreams May Come won an Academy Award. Stephen Hannock's formal artistic training began at Bowdoin and led him to participate in the Twelve College Exchange, where at Smith College he came under the influence of Leonard Baskin, the renowned sculptor, illustrator, printmaker, and graphic artist. Hannock is deeply influenced by the great American landscape painters of the nineteenth century, especially Thomas Cole, whose sweeping vistas of rugged Eastern terrain were imbued with a sense of the romantic and the sublime. Hannock's dramatic neo-Luminist paintings have been featured in numerous national publications and museum collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Whitney Museum of American Art, The National Gallery of Art in Washington, Yale University Art Gallery and the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego. As well, Hannock and frequent collaborator Sting were the contemporary annex to the Metropolitan Museum of Art 2018 exhibition entitled, Thomas Cole's Journey, Atlantic Crossings. Hannock's painting of the Connecticut River Oxbow was chosen for inclusion in the recently published Metropolitan Museum of Art, Masterpiece Paintings.